At this point, McChrystal does not know when he is going to meet with President Obama. He will learn this tomorrow morning from Gates.

A REPLACEMENT: So who would replace McChrystal if he is fired? White House "war czar" / adviser Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute is a logical choice. (Gen. James Mattis? Not likely. Mattis got passed over for the position of Commandant of the Marine Corps...and is very angry about it, and doesn't want to clean up someone else's mess. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, McChrystal's number two, would also be considered, per the AP.)

LOW BLOW: Avowed opponents of McChrystal are whispering about the DoD's inspector general's report on abuses at Camp Nama, which McChrystal oversaw as Commander in Chief of the Joint Special Operations Command. It hasn't been released.

ROLLING STAN (2): Overlooked in Rolling Stone's article: hints that McChrystal and his team were planning to ask for more troops in
July of 2011, when the drawdown of U.S. troops is supposed to have
begun. Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama
promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign
even further. "There's a possibility we could ask for another
surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here," a senior
military official in Kabul tells me

The full Afghanistan strategy
review meeting is set for 11:30 a.m. in the situation room. Obama's
private meeting with McChrystal (which will probably include the vice president at some point) is TBD. Pointing out that Obama is within his
rights to fire McChrystal, his advisers dismiss criticism that any delay
in acting puts the mission in jeopardy. Even though the premise of the
Rolling Stone article was that McChrystal had sold the administration a
bag of glass shards and that the strategy was really an academic
exercise -- one guy's war, really -- an official told me that "it's not
one person's war. McChrystal's still in command, and nothing changes
until it changes." That is, the war doesn't stop. Also, the adviser
dismisses the notion that Obama is trying to put McChrystal in his place
by allowing him to twist in the wind.

"He really does want to
hear what he has to say, and he has not decided what to do at this
point." The counter view: "Obama could come out of this as a strong
leader. But that also depends on results a year down the line. But if he
is to come out of this as a steely leader, he cannot DITHER on this and
be a lawyer. HE has to act." The counter-counter view: the White House
cares about winning the F$#*@^% war, not anyone's feelings or political
opinions. Yes, emotions are raw over there today. NB: Most of Obama's
war cabinet wants McChrystal to stay, but they're treading lightly in
terms of how they're giving this advice to Obama, framing the decision
for him as one alternative to another, appropriate, viable alternative. WHITE HOUSE LATE NEWS:
The Department of the Interior issued a new drilling moratorium after a
judge blocked the first one. And Obama promised an audience of LGBT
activists that repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell will happen soon. "Now,
the only way to lock this in -- the only way to get the votes in
Congress to roll back this policy -- is if we work with the Pentagon,
who are in the midst of two wars," he said.

DR. LAURA: Former
NEC chair Laura Tyson has the inside track to become the next director
of OMB, although the White House is vetting several candidates. An
announcement is likely by the end of the month. The selection of Tyson
would be a testament not only to her credentials and skills as a
communicator, but also to the way that Peter Orszag transformed the job,
from behind-the-scenes wonk to front-line policy seller. This White
House needs good economic front people, and Tyson is one.

HOLD
ON: Sens. Wyden and Grassley will testify before the Senate Rules
Committee on a proposal to end secret Senate holds ... though Democrats
believe they're close to the 60 votes needed to change the rule, they're
also in an awkward spot. A Democratic senator, working with the labor
movement, is currently holding up dozens of President Obama's
nominees...after a deal between the White House, Mitch McConnell and
Harry Reid was reached about the National Labor Relations Board.

BUSINESS BEAT: The
Atlantic Business Channel's Daniel Indiviglio notes that the Fed's Open
Market Committee meeting concludes Wednesday, at which time we'll get a
statement in the afternoon. No change of any significance is expected,
but a few months ago many believed we'd have more concrete information
on the exit strategy time line by now. But given the problems in Europe,
and absence of additional fiscal stimulus by the federal government,
monetary policy is likely to stay loose for even longer. At most, we may
get some more detail on its plans to sell assets. It would be quite
surprising if any of its language about rates changes (i.e. they'll
probably say that rates will stay near zero for "an extended period").

In
economic news, we'll get the National Association of Realtors new home
sales numbers for May. In the first month without a home buyer credit,
it probably won't be pretty. Economists expect a 20% fall, but it could
be even worse, as existing sales (which weren't yet broadly affected by
the credit's absence due to timing) failed to meet expectations
(economists thought they'd be up 5%, but they were down 2%), which
Indiviglio wrote about today here.

MORE
BOOTHBIES: Wired's Noah Shahctman on the glut of
former journalists-turned-Pentagon image consultants: "Boothby is
one of a handful of former journalists who in recent years became
communications aides to top officers and diplomats. USA Today's Dave
Moniz now works as a media advisor to the Chief of Staff of the Air
Force and to other top officers. Time magazine's Sally Donnelly is today
a special assistant to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of StaffAdmiral
Mike Mullen. The Chicago Tribune's Bay Fang currently works in
Afghanistan as a strategic communications advisor to the State
Department. David S. Cloud briefly assisted U.S. ambassador to Kabul
Karl Eikenberry before returning to journalism; he's now with the Los
Angeles Times. Rosa Brooks, a former Times columnist, advises Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and also serves as a
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense."

PRIMARIES: No surprises: Nikki Haley defeated Gresham Barrett for
the SC GOP gubernatorial nomination. She'll probably become the state's
next governor. An African American, Tim Scott, won the nomination in
South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, beating Strom Thurmond's
son of all people, the prevailing storyline will be good for the GOP:
racial and gender diversity is alive in at least one precinct of the
party. Don't make too much of this, though: the GOP is still
lily-white. And it's just now beginning to attract (and aggressively
recruit) African Americans to run, usually conservative Christian
entrepreneurs or veterans.

A better narrative: Haley's future in
politics, assuming the affair allegations just go away, and her
purifying reform message, a variant of which is being used by successful
GOP candidates across the country. (The Club for Growth put a lot of
money and energy into South Carolina, too -- don't overlook their
contribution.) NB: the very big defeat of Rep. Bob Inglis, the third to be defeated in a primary this cycle. ... Also, NC Sec of
State Elaine Marshall won the Senate Democratic run-off; voters ignored
the establishment's pleas to chose Cal Cunningham. And, alas for
Democrats, they did not get their preferred candidate from Republicans
in North Carolina's 8th Congressional District. (Harold Johnson defeat
Tim D'Annunzio.) Utah results are TBD.

UPDATE: PER THE AP, THIS MEETING HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL NEXT WEEK.

CLIMATE CHANGE:Tomorrow,
President Obama strategizes with Senate Democrats about climate change
legislation. There are three approaches on the table: the basic
Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade approach; the Snowe-Cantwell
cap-and-dividend approach; and Sen. Jeff Bingaman's 15% renewable
standard, which would not impose a cap on carbon. The White House is
leaning towards a hybrid way forward that focuses on renewables this
year ... along the lines of the House's climate bill ... and NEXT year
attempts to impose carbon caps on SOME sectors, like the utility
industry, which would account for about half of all the emission
reductions if everyone were regulated. (David Roberts of Grist has a lot
more about this proposal here.)

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.